Intel to show 8-core Xeon on February 2009

Intel will give its first public look at an 8-core Xeon processor in less than two weeks at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the show's schedule (PDF) reveals. The unnamed chip will double the core count of existing Xeons and is based on the same 45 nanometer manufacturing process and Nehalem architecture that underpins the Core i7. The shift adds Hyperthreading and will let even a single-socket Xeon processor theoretically address as many as 16 simultaneous program threads at once by putting two threads on each core.

No other details are directly revealed, though Nehalem brings with it the newer point-to-point QuickPath technology that eliminates the need for a dedicated system bus between the processor and peripherals.

Intel isn't expected to release the 8-core processor at the event, which often touches on roadmaps rather than production hardware. However, quad-core Nehalem Xeons are expected to arrive in the early part of the year and will be fundamentally similar outside of their reduced multi-processing.